invest in Sherman Antitrust Act memes now
Justice Department considering push for historic break up of Google after landmark antitrust ruling: report
Submitted 2 months ago by Gsus4@mander.xyz to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
expatriado@lemmy.world 2 months ago
TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 2 months ago
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Unless Savannah is some girl he knows, not sure this lands. Savannah, GA wasn’t really ever ravaged in the Civil War or anything.
ThePantser@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How about we start restricting how many businesses a company is allowed to buy out in a year. Maybe allow like 1-2 mergers a year. There no reason we should allow one company to buy everyone and then kill their products and services leaving the consumers holding the bag that will no longer function because the server is gone.
cybersandwich@lemmy.world 2 months ago
One thing that I’ve always found interesting is that silicon valley has a common start up strategy that is basically: do well enough to get bought buy your bigger competition. Basically, be a threat so your VCs can cash in when a Google, Facebook, etc buys you.
I’m other words, Silicon Valley has a start up culture that feeds an anticompetitive/anti-trust ecosystem. No one complains because they are all making money. It’s the users who slowly suffer and we end up were we are not with 5 companies running the modern web and Internet infrastructure.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Can I vote for YOU for president?
ScreaminOctopus@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
Buyouts shouldn’t be allowed by default. The only cases where it should be allowed are when the business being bought out is struggling to the point where a buyout is really the only way to prevent bankruptcy. It should never be a good deal for the selling company and only a last resort to stop closing doors completely.
EncryptKeeper@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Buying out companies takes longer than a year usually.
ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Ah yes, but you see, the US government only cares about faceless corporations, business owners and other rich people, and not about the average citizen, sorry.
KittyCat@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’d go further, restrict the market cap for businesses so they have to spin off if they get too big. Add to that a value limit for the number of boards you can sit on so 30 companies can’t be controlled by the same people.
Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Maybe if all their shadiness hadn’t been allowed in the first place they wouldn’t have been able to become a monopoly.
But please, I beg of you, do Adobe next.
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 months ago
No, Amazon next.
RecluseRamble@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
How would the US JD break up a Swiss corp?
curry@programming.dev 2 months ago
I remember the days of google being a cool startup that had just made news releasing gmail with a whopping 1GB of storage making everyone go crazy for the invites. It’s a strange feeling.
FabledAepitaph@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Yeah, I thought Google was so cool around 2004. Now I can’t wait for them to become irrelevant. I need to stop using “googling” as a verb…
A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Hell, do all the “to big to fail” megacorps.
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I worry what a broken up Adobe would do to workflows. One of the reasons I can do what I do is because Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere all work with each other.
Now if we want to save Behance and Frame.io, substance, Mixamo, etc, I am all for that.
Churbleyimyam@lemm.ee 2 months ago
I don’t know how deeply their different programs integrate with each other (I don’t do video or illustration seriously) but one would hope that it might encourage them to adopt more open standards and formats. For example, in my photography workflow I can import and catalogue a RAW image with Shotwell, which passes it through to my RAW developer (Rawtherapee), which in turn passes it through to my raster editor (GIMP). These programs are all developed separately from each other by people with much less resources than Adobe, so I think it’s a matter of choice rather than a technical limitation.
ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Do it do it do it do it do it do it…
Smash them with a hammer. Google should not exist as it is. Not for decades.
Break up AdSense, chrome, search, android, shatter them all into separate companies that can stop selling out literally every waking aspect of life as their sole business model.
4lan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
and then prosecute them for antitrust if those companies conspire together
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Would adsense even be worth it without the search? I really don’t want that popping up in even more places. My thoughts would be
Google Search + ad sense Chrome Android Waze YouTube G Suite FitBit Nest
And then there’s a ton of other misc stuff I’m unaware of
cybermass@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Don’t stop with them
ameancow@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Crush corporations, swiftly and without fanfare rebuild capitalism with worker co-ops, seize the means of production without all that stagnation and failure that usually follows.
Verito@lemm.ee 2 months ago
rebuild capitalism Replace, yes?
MCasq_qsaCJ_234@lemmy.zip 2 months ago
Will cooperatives really be able to offer good services or will they become corrupt sooner or later?
432@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Best news I’ve heard all day! Break up Meta, too, while you’re at it!
jordanlund@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Not sure how that would work…
I’m old enough to remember the breakup of Ma Bell and the way that worked was the creation of a bunch of regional telecom services, that’s not going to work on the Internet.
I guess they could mandate spinning off Android, but that’s not really the problem addressed in the antitrust case, is it?
Maybe split the AdWords side from the Search Engine side?
Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 months ago
I’d guess it would be a vertical breakup rather than horizontal: separate android, youtube, search, chrome, ads…depending on how aggressive they want to be.
mkwt@lemmy.world 2 months ago
But if they’ve only been found to monopolize search, how does that remedy the search monopoly? Presumably the new separate Google Search company would still have a search monopoly.
Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world 2 months ago
If you seperate Youtube from Google, I cannot see youtube surviving. It’s probably a loss leader for them.
namingthingsiseasy@programming.dev 2 months ago
I think each of these needs to be handled in separate ways. For example, search could continue to be a conglomeration that includes maps, mail and possibly cloud. Android can just be split very easily into a separate company and same for Youtube, since that would basically be another Netflix or whatever.
Ads, in my opinion, is the most important one though. That absolutely has to be shattered into thousands of tiny pieces, all of which need to be forced to compete with each other, for the benefit of all internet companies anywhere. It would be a massive boon to companies everywhere and would provide an opportunity for lots of innovation in the advertising space, ie. trying ads that are less intrusive or ones that are cheaper because they don’t rely on tracking information.
And another thing I think people need to understand about search is that building the search engine is not the hard part - the hard part is figuring out how to pay for it. Search is really expensive - crawling websites, indexing, fighting spam abuse. That’s what really makes Google successful - the fact that they coupled it with advertising so that they could cover all the expenses that come with managing a search engine. That’s much more important than the quality of the results, in my opinion.
And as for Chrome: well, personally I think that monopoly has been the most damaging to the internet as a whole. I would love to see it managed as part of a non-profit consortium. There should not be any profit motive whatsoever in building a web browser. If you want a profit motive, build a website - the browser should just be the tool to get to your profit model, not the profit model itself. And therefore it should be developed by multiple interest groups, not just one advertising company.
Anyway, I know this is all an impossible fantasy. Nothing in the world is done because it’s right or wrong, it’s done because it serves whoever holds the most power. But if there were a just world, this is what I think it would look like.
AlexWIWA@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I think the problem with Google is that none of their side projects actually make any money. I don’t have a solution here
AlternatePersonMan@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I’m drooling at the thought.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Not breaking up Google because the effects would be inconvenient would literally be letting a monopoly regin because they’re a monopoly.
Shut down services if needed. We can adapt.
robolemmy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Never forget that the baby bells slowly reassembled themselves. They’re not a single company but they’re down to 3 or 4 now
Bob_Robertson_IX@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Which is exactly where it should be… having regional phone companies sucked. Having 1 phone company sucked. Having 3-4 is the least sucky, but we have real competition.
Before tearing apart Google and Amazon, I’df much prefer we have 3-4 choices for internet providers (unless we can turn them into utilities, then we should do that).
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Making YouTube its own thing again wouldn’t be that hard.
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Neither you nor almost anyone who upvoted you or replied to you read the article, huh
jordanlund@lemmy.world 2 months ago
FTA:
“DOJ attorneys could ask Judge Amit Mehta to order Google to sell portions of its business”
That’s the author of the article speculating, they don’t know what it would actually look like any more than you or I do.
Bonus, as I noted, it doesn’t address the primary issue of a search monopoly. Even if they sell off those business unit, the search monopoly remains.
rekabis@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Separate the search engine from anything that stinks of advertising so it can return to what it’s supposed to do: return the most relevant results.
Because even appending
udm=14only gets rid of promoted links and in-page advertising, it does f**k-all to correct manipulated search results.helenslunch@feddit.nl 2 months ago
No business in their right mind is going to just disable advertising altogether. There’s no other viable way to support a search engine. Google search has been supported by advertising since day 1.
They can fix search without removing advertising, they’re just going to have to earn it instead of paying other service providers to make it the default.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
A decentralized search engine, running on something like what Locutus (neo-Freenet) is intended to be, can work without a business.
setsneedtofeed@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Can you elaborate on the business model of a search engine that has no ads?
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
The only business model that really works is charging people to use it, like Kagi is doing.
dan@upvote.au 2 months ago
even appending
udm=14FYI all this is doing is going to the “Web” tab of the results. You can just click it instead of modifying the URL.
Moah@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
And chrome from everything else too
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 2 months ago
Chrome doesn’t make any money. How is it supposed to support itself as a separate company?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
What about Microsoft and Facebook?
androogee@midwest.social 2 months ago
How do the people who make this comment every single time something like this happens, expect change when no one’s allowed to be first?
AJ1@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
Microsoft already lost an anti-trust suit in 2001. It’s in the article if you care to read it.
trafficnab@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
We already had first Microsoft anti-trust suit, but what about second Microsoft anti-trust suit?
MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Thanks
Spaceinv8er@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
No one reads the articles man. I won’t lie, I’m guilty of it, but it’s mainly cuz Im lazy and go to the comments hoping someone will give a synopsis.
Snapz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
“They said smugly without an ounce of depth in their argument.”
Neon@lemmy.world 2 months ago
I so want this to happen, but at the same time I’m scared that Samsung or whoever will buy AOSP and enshittify it completely
nexussapphire@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Isn’t it already licensed under permissive Apache v2? Anyone can fork and carry on the project without the permission of Google, every manufacturer already does as a result of the license.
LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 2 months ago
So they’re breaking up Google but giving Intel more free money after it cut 15k jobs?
Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Google also cut 12000 jobs in Jan 2023, but it does not have an AMD or Nvidia to kick its ass in search when it fucks up.
LavenderDay3544@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Intel is a near monopoly and it controls the physical hardware that runs the entire universe with the exception of mobile devices and embedded.
If you’re going to break anyone up that’s who I would go for first but because of the pipe dream of making computer chips in 'Murica these idiot politicians keep propping up Intel’s Wall Street investors while its employees get fucked over.
At the very least the x86 duopoly has to end. It’s not only legal but kept the way it is because of legal contracts. The courts need to declare them void because their enforcement leads to to the violation of antitrust laws.
doodledup@lemmy.world 2 months ago
How is this related?
tabular@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Will the old method of breaking up a company work enough on modern tech companies? Will the 2nd best map software ever catch up in market share?
Snapz@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Fully support the action, don’t know how the timing works…
Best case, you only start to basically outline what this looks like before the election. Worst case, you enliven the complacent, left-centrist billionaires to vigorously join in with the perpetually batshit right wing billionaires to get trump in to “live to fight another day” with the reasoning of, “we need to save ourselves first, then we’ll deal with trump when he goes full fascist” and then they either won’t be able to or won’t care to because they won’t want to upset their share price.
littlewonder@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Will this work out for consumers if other tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon, etc. aren’t also broken up simultaneously? Won’t Google’s assets just get sucked up into another existing monopoly and we’ll be right back where we were but with one less choice than before?
I’m genuinely curious.
Linktank@lemmy.today 2 months ago
Now break up Coca-Cola, those tax dodging fucks.
Jackcooper@lemmy.world 2 months ago
PBMs/healthcare conglomerating needs to be looked at as a top priority
And this Kroger Albertsons thing needs to be stopped for good
reddig33@lemmy.world 2 months ago
It would probably do Google a world of good, depending on what gets split or spun off. A lot of Google products have unrealized potential that’s hamstrung by poor leadership and privacy issues. Maybe at least some of their products will be able to thrive on their own.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 months ago
A tiny bandaid on the capitalism that’s literally destroying the planet.
rottingleaf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
A dog that barks doesn’t bite.
“Considering” means they want to get something from Google in exchange for not breaking it up.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
I don’t hold my breath until they really do it.
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Cool. Take their search stuff, open source all the software, spin out an account service and 6 baby search engine companies.
Do the same with each of their massive properties.
figaro@lemdro.id 2 months ago
The people here who 1) think a breakup of Google will actually happen, and 2) think that a paid subscription model for a search engine have all been spending too much time in their Linux bubble.
If Google did this, everyone would just switch to Bing, or open AI’s new thing they are making. The general public will not be on board with that.
jabjoe@feddit.uk 2 months ago
May I recommended watching “The YouTube Effect” if you don’t see the problem with big tech companies.
_sideffect@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Good luck, I’m all for it, but good luck
time_fo_that@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Okay now do Microsoft, Apple, Nvidia, Blackrock, etc etc
Yokozuna@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Great, now do the rest of them.
jackhp95@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Alphabet soup
Beaver@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
That’s what I like to hear!
Roflmasterbigpimp@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Do it.
TransplantedSconie@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Do it! Then, do every single major conglomerate they’ve allowed to form over the last 30 years
Gsus4@mander.xyz 2 months ago
Antitrust comes in waves in the US. First, it’s a free for all to let the tech develop freely…then you see the horrors and a time of antitrust kicks in. Let’s hope it’s a good one.
200ok@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Interesting! Go ooooonnnn 😍
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Keep going I’m almost there
_sideffect@lemmy.world 2 months ago
😂